Many handheld or otherwise portable electronic appliances are equipped with cameras. The most popular of such appliances is the cellular telephone. The cellular telephone has become a ubiquitous tool necessary in daily life for communication and entertainment. With the advent of camera phones, users are now able to send and receive pictures via their cellular phones. However, most camera phones in current practice have cameras in a fixed position, usually facing opposite the display screen. This causes the user difficulty in taking self portraits, or using the camera phone for video conferencing.
One attempt to solve this problem has been to place a small mirror close to the camera so the user can see their reflection to have an estimate of the photo the camera will take. However, such small mirrors provide an image that is not identical to the image received by the camera lens, are easily tarnished, scratched, and often become unusable shortly into the life of the device.
Another attempt at a solution is a camera that is rotatably mounted on the hinge of a flip style cellular phone. However, this approach is necessarily constrained to a flip style camera phone.
Another attempt in current practice is a barrel rolling mechanism integrated in the phone or appliance to house the camera. While this proposal can be applied to any type of phone or other electronic appliance, it uses valuable space for the barrel rotation mechanism. Space comes at a greater premium as cellular telephones increase in complexity and function while consumers demand smaller form factors. Furthermore, both these attempts discussed provide a wide range of lens angles in which the camera housing can be positioned. This is not necessary. This is also unnecessarily complex. The wide range of angles at which the current solutions can be positioned is burdensome since often times the user must adjust both the camera position and the direction in which the camera is being pointed. What is needed is a camera housing that is adaptable to an electronic appliance such as a cellular phone, PDA, a laptop computer, a desktop computer, a multimedia center, a portable music player, or any other suitable device, that is positionable in two discrete positions: one that faces substantially towards the user and one that faces substantially away from the user.